Category: Finance

Passionate indifference about companies

Responsible citizens should be passionately indifferent about for-profit companies unless there is something in it for them.

Pro-corporate activism without a quid pro quo:

  1. Disrupts the free market system’s feedback mechanisms by irrationally rewarding or penalizing companies. This can create undeserving winners and losers. A great example is American automakers, which are still around mainly because of consumers who irrationally ignore better alternatives to almost the entire domestic vehicle lineup.
  2. Unethically saps resources from charitable nonprofits, which are the only entities that really deserve uncompensated activism.

I recently directed my activist zeal towards a for-profit company by publicly and forcefully supporting a developer’s for-profit project, and I did it without violating my ethical code.

How do I justify this undeserved activism? Here’s my quid pro quo:

  1. Should the project be built, it will increase property values and desirability of my area.
  2. I get the experience of taking a forceful public position on an issue.
  3. Valuable lessons learned.
  4. I am exposed to leaders and “the way things worked” in ways otherwise impossible.
  5. I develop contacts and meet people I would have otherwise never met.
  6. I was pissed off at reactionary, anti-development zealotry, and this experience was cathartic.

Even though I ended up on the losing team, the experience was worth it.

How Intuit TurboTax Blew It

Since 2000, I have used Intuit’s TurboTax Online tax filing system. It was a great, affordable online tax preparation utility that slashed tax preparation effort. My finances are straightforward enough to use TurboTax’s $20 product, which is now free!

They screwed it up. See the two buttons on the bottom of this page?
Turbo Tax Shenanigan

If you click on Maximize My Deductions, that $0 product magically becomes $50. Not only does this surcharge buy you a gimmicky extra, you can’t “undo” it. Worst yet, you get no warning that you’re about to be soaked $50. It takes multiple clicks to get from this page to anything advising you of this charge.

Deduction Maximizer is a “gimmick” because all it really does is phrase deduction questions somewhat differently. Unless you’re a financial moron or have really bizarre finances, this feature won’t affect your taxes.

I checked throughout TurboTax’s system to see if I could undo this, but no such option was available. Then I tried to chat with an online assistant, but that entailed a 20 minute wait.

Thankfully, TurboTax doesn’t make you pay until the very end. Presumably because of this, the online product’s “satisfaction guarantee” is simply that you don’t pay until you’re satisfied. (Of course, you can’t see your forms, get final data, or file electronically until you pay!)

Fortunately, enough information was available so that could go back through the system and pull out all the key information. Slapping that into paper IRS forms only took an hour. TurboTax’s tax refund estimate was within pennies of what I got doing it manually.

I am dissatisfied with TurboTax, so they didn’t get my money.

Rigid Dryer Vents Save Money

A few weeks ago, I replaced my flexible dryer vent with a rigid kind.

One of the premises is that the flexible vent increases fire risk. While I think that premise is way overblown, I changed the vent anyway to be on the safe side.

I now know that better dryer venting can dramatically reduce your clothes drying time! Drying a full load of jeans used to take 90 minutes. The new dryer vent cut that to 50 minutes.

Drying clothes costs real money, so this dryer vent replacement will make a welcome dent in my utility bills.

The Future of IT

I found this Dallas Morning News article about the future of IT especially salient. (If prompted to login, get a username and password from www.bugmenot.com.) In a nutshell, Gartner says IT workers must broadly diversify skills or get steamrolled. Gartner further predicts major IT upheaval by 2010.

I had a similar revelation shortly after getting my BS in Computer Science in 1999. Even back then–the middle of the tech boom–skills taught just ten years ago were already becoming irrelevant or commoditized. In plain terms, that means it can become cheaper for your employer to purchase what you do from another firm than to keep you employed. Before my undergrad days, I lived near the Johnson Space Center in Houston, and I saw how people with dinosaur skill sets were often the first to be laid off. They were also the last to find a comparable replacement job.

These revelations are part of what led me to pursue my MS in Computer Science, and they continue to push me towards my in-progress Engineering Management degree.

These revelations are also a motivation (not the motivation) behind my involvement in community organizations. And by involvement, I am not just talking about essentials like pounding nails and folding newsletters. These are important jobs, and I help with them, but I go beyond that and work within the system to motivate others to pound nails and fold newsletters even better. When I help out in this way with Boy Scouts or with my neighborhood association, I am honing life and career skills. This is part of my education. I think that few people realize the immense value one gets from the lessons learned from going that extra mile in community service. Such involvement benefits you as much as it benefits the community.

These revelations also why I try to diversify my skill set beyond what I can get in a classroom. The above-mentioned community service gives me opportunity to test management skills learned in my degree program. My praxis topic allows me to deeply explore a controversial aspect traffic engineering that also has implications for politics, ethics, and economics.

All IT workers should ask themselves three questions:

  • Are my skills only the basic skills for 2006?
  • Do I have knowledge that somehow goes beyond the bachelors-level? Can I do many things that freshly-minted graduates cannot do?
  • Are my skills a “one hit wonder”? Is my overall skill set highly specialized?

An IT worker who answer yes to any of these questions should be gravely concerned. To survive in this industry, they must fix the problem or quickly plan an exit strategy.

The writing is not only on the wall, it’s etched on the stone outside and tattooed on your forehead. In the IT field, those who get ahead are those who learn and adapt. Many of those who don’t will not have gainful IT employment in as soon a a few years.

Compact Fluorescent Bulbs Pay Off Handsomely


Typical compact
fluorescent bulb.

Over the past two years, I have gradually replaced most my light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs.

Many claim these bulbs save a ton of money, but they cost a lot. Try $8 for a new compact fluorescent bulb that is equivalent to a $0.50 100W incandescent. Do they really pay off?

Here’s the math:

Bulb Type Incandescent Compact Fluorescent
Wattage 100 27
Bulb lifetime 1500 10000
Initial cost $0.50 $8
Cost per hour of usage $0.00874 $0.00080
Cost per year of typical usage $25.53 $2.34

Two assumptions using this math:

  1. Electricity costs $0.0841 per kWh, which is the 1998-2003 average according to the US Department of Energy (link).
  2. “typical usage” is 8 hours a day: 2 hours in the morning and 6 hours at night.

Regardless of one’s typical usage, it is abundantly clear that, even after accounting for the initial cost, compact fluorescent bulbs overall cost about a tenth to run as traditional bulbs. Most of this is due to their lower energy usage, but part is due to their dramatically increased life span.

90% of the energy consumed by incandescent bulbs are kicked off as heat. This calculation does not catch two things related to that:

  1. If you live in a warm climate, you run the A/C far more than you run the heater. If you create more heat in the house, guess what happens to your electricity bills? They go up because you have to use the A/C even more.
  2. Even if you live in a cold climate–where you run the heat far more than A/C–you are still better off running compact fluorescents unless you have a house exclusively heated by electricity. Gas/propane/oil heating cheaper than electric heat, so while the incandescent bulbs could slightly reduce central heater utilization, you are effectively supplementing a “cheaper to operate” heater with a more expensive one.

CF bulbs have even more advantages. By reducing demand, they can extend the usable life of lower capacity electrical systems that are common in older houses. Thanks to lower heat output, they are safer, especially in lamps or in older houses where certain exposed light fixtures are installed in locations where they wouldn’t be allowed today.

Compact fluorescent bulbs definitely pay off!